Background on Al Weinrub
Al Weinrub was born October 28, 1943, to Joseph George Weinrub and Tillie Weinrub in Buffalo, New York. He was introduced to physics at an early age through his father, who was an engineer with the U.S. army corps that assisted with federal waterway projects in the lower Great Lakes. After studying engineering physics at Cornell College as an undergraduate, he left upstate New York to attend a doctoral applied physics program at Harvard University.
During this time, the scientific community was facing significant challenges from within. Internal disagreements on issues relating to accountability in science came into focus when the American Physical Society (APS) voted down an amendment that would permit the organization to take a stance on the Vietnam War. Physicists who opposed this viewpoint organized a new radical group: Scientists for Social and Political Action, later renamed Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action. SESPA acted as a radical, non-hierarchical grassroots organization that contested the lack of accountability in science regarding imperialism and supported innovation in the interests of the people, not the government. For its first five years, Weinrub was coordinator of their bi-monthly magazine, Science for the People, that would be published through the 1970s and 1980s. The magazine would serve as the namesake for a Boston-based branch of SESPA and now one of the most well-known radical science movements in the United States, Science for the People (SftP). They tackled controversial scientific debates including militarism, genetic engineering, women's health care, nuclear power, and sociobiology. In the coming years, the group would expand outside of Boston, with chapters forming throughout the world. Weinrub would participate in a conference held at UMass Amherst in 2014 called "Science for the People: The 1970s and Today," bringing insight into his role as a co-founder in the early days of the organization.
Simultaneous with SftP, Weinrub's time at Harvard included other socio-political movements. He was connected with Students for a Democratic Society, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, and groups questioning the militarization of scientific research. Just a few months before graduating, he was nearly expelled for organizing a protest with the National Movement Against Apartheid (NMAA). He was accused of attempting to prevent a speech from Polaroid Corporation president Edwin H. Land, whose company had been connected with photo identification systems for South Africa's government. Charges were dropped, and he graduated from Harvard in 1971. He stayed in Boston for a few more years to teach at Boston University, offering radical science courses that integrated women's rights, politics, and the history of science into physics. In 1974, he moved to San Jose, California.
In an interview with the newspaper Isthmus, Weinrub said that his greatest period of learning came not from Cornell or Harvard but from the eight years he spent driving a bus in San Jose. He continued his radical efforts from Boston through work with various unions and organizations based in California, many aligned with Marxism-Leninism. He participated in post-civil rights anti-racism, feminism, demilitarization and nuclear disarmament, addressing the 1970s energy crisis, affirmative action, and labor rights. He was a member of the Labor Commission for Line of March, teaming with Jesse Jackson's National Rainbow Coalition to broaden the scope of the labor movement's class and diversity. Beyond U.S. domestic politics, Weinrub was also involved in efforts to dismantle U.S. intervention in Central and Latin America. He co-founded the Labor Network on Central America and edited the Labor Report on Central America, through which he co-authored "AFL-CIO in Central America," a booklet questioning the AFL-CIO's support of U.S. militarized foreign policy.
Weinrub became a member of the National Writers Union (NWU) in the late 1980s, strengthening the rights of freelancers through union organization. He acted as treasurer and delegate of the Bay Area chapter before being elected the First Vice President of the national chapter. While he was a member, the union established the Tech Writers Jobs Hotline, worked with local legislature to increase pay for temp agencies, fought for copyright and electronic rights, worked through the Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v Tasini, and expanded diversity within the organization. He was particularly involved with the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, a political activist, NWU member, and political death-row prisoner who wrote on the biases of the American criminal justice system.
While living in Oakland, he met Edith Jenkins, marrying in 1990. They had one son, Brandon Jenkins-Weinrub, who died in 2019.
Weinrub retired from technical writing in the late 2000s, devoting his time to climate and energy activism. He supported the implementation of community choice aggregation (CCA), a system that allows communities to control local energy and supports the use of alternative sources. He served as a coordinator for the Local Clean Energy Alliance (LCEA) and California Alliance for Community Energy (CACE), promoting the democratization of energy resources, increasing sustainability opportunities, and recognizing the consequences of energy choices on local communities. The LCEA worked closely with the Oakland Climate Action Coalition (OCAC) to bring concerns into legislative spaces, especially within Oakland's and California's local government. In 2017, he published Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions with Denise Fairchild as part of the Energy Democracy Project, a group that highlights the efforts of and issues faced by local communities to utilize renewable energy. Weinrub's dedication to climate activism included also recognizing social disparities within the energy field. In a piece written for the Nonprofit Quarterly he wrote, "unless we address institutionalized racism within the energy sector, we will not be successful in fixing the climate crisis." In 2023, Weinrub was recognized as a Lifelong Energy Justice Champion by the CACE.
Al Weinrub continued to write until just a few months before his death on August 30, 2023.
